Every ten years the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth holds a megaconference and tries to solve the problems of, if not the world, then its own profession. In her introduction to this symposium, Henrietta Moore asks: "What role can anthropology play in the multi-polar, globalized, postcolonial world we all now inhabit?" It is a big question.

Readers expecting a major stocktaking enterprise, however, with essays carefully dovetailed together by an all-seeing editor, may be disappointed. The six chapters, plus an introduction and afterword, are essentially reports on the authors' research. They are most useful in explaining how, now that there are no new tribes to discover, there are still close communities to be explored. These are the social orders that arise from fashion, professional practice, government policy and social class, and some of them are described here.

The contributors are fairly diverse. Emily Martin extends her work about social understandings of medical immunity to illustrate laypersons' responses to micro-graphs, hugely magnified images of the viruses and immune cells that scientists, teachers and the popular media use nowadays to carry the "truth" of science to the public.

Norman Long puts forward an agenda for rural research. Drawing on studies at Wageningen Agricultural University in Holland, where he has worked, he observes that food producers in Europe and elsewhere, "construct their own farming world" over and again, often in opposition to the schemes offered by scientists and advisers.

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Two contributors home in on the new China. Aihwa Ong sees China as wired by an "exclusively Chinese" trait, guanxi or networks of family-like ties for the conduct of business. The result is a combination of Confucian state paternalism, restricted individualism, and guanxi-based capitalism. Mayfair Yang's paper is ostensibly about the restoration of Chinese traditions by southern China's new wealthy classes and the way the authorities opposed this as "feudal" (fengjian zhuyi). But, she asks,where did such a very western view of Chinese history come from? As she explains, it originated in 1877 with the American Lewis Henry Morgan, and then was transmitted via Marx, Engels, and Stalin to revolutionary China, where it still holds sway.

Wazir-Jahan Karim is the only "local" contributor. Though western-trained, she works in a non-western university (Malaysia's Science University) and offers a robust, witty, and often sarcastic critique of the way that anthropologists have been manoeuvred into becoming the weak ally of the China's arcane, peripheral and "least wealthy and greedy" people.

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Paul Richards, somewhat in diarist mode, takes us to the Gola forest in Liberia. Farmers and traders live on the forest's edge, but the guerrillas have set up bases in it and finance their activities by diamond extraction. While the Mende farmers respond to change in terms of traditional magical beliefs, the guerrillas survive through access to the most up-to-date information and equipment (satellite receivers, weapons, recreational drugs).

In his afterword, Peter Harries-Jones offers some (rather desultory) remarks on the conference, and outlines his work with Canadian "advocacy" groups. He castigates anthropology for not aiding and researching social advocacy movements and giving "no relief to the native world from which it draws".

This book tries to address the pressing question of what to do with "anthropological knowledge", whether, as Harries-Jones puts it, to ride in the bus or push it. Perhaps the questions are overstated, or not the right ones, but the unease and conscience reading are real enough.

W. D. Wilder is senior lecturer in anthropology, University of Durham.

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